I’ve seen some baffling science fiction in my day–Dark City, Naked Lunch, most anything by David Croenenburg–and yet, I find myself truly at a loss to explain Logan’s Run to anybody, including you.

See, the crew out at Warner Brothers brought this one back from the dead, thanks to that incredible invention known simply as Blu-ray, and they sent me a copy.

So anyway, this is about a post-apocalyptic society that takes shelter in a massive domed compound where most everything you could ever need is taken care of by robots.  As a result, humanity has become a race dedicated to hedonistic pleasures.  Why not?  Not like there’s anything else to do.  But anyway, there’s a catch to all this–when you turn thirty, they kill you ritualistically in something called Carousel.  And if you decide you don’t want to die, you’ll be pursued by Sandmen, the city’s police, and killed anyway.  Unless you’re one of the handful of people who make it to Sanctuary, a location no one knows about.  But with the Sandmen dispatched to destroy Sanctuary, the runners may not have a chance.

With a setting like the weird science-fiction cousin of A Clockwork Orange, set in a city that looks for all the world like a model on a card table, and with a plot that’s just this side of completely bughouse nuts, it’s hard to make sense out of large portions of Logan’s Run.

Not that it’s not entertaining, at least somewhat, but the logic here is so thoroughly mindless and the effects so clearly antiquated that it just all gets in the way.  This is a movie that could actually stand a remake.  With a little less of the clunky special effects getting in the way, maybe this whole thing would make a little more sense.

Then again, maybe not.  I’m already having a pretty rough time with the whole plot, which appears to be lifted from at least two different sources that I can think of offhand, and maybe more than that.

The Screenhead Ten Scale shrugs nonchalantly, and gives this strange, confused sludge of a movie a five out of ten.  If you like them dreamlike and surrealist then you’ll love this one in spades.  Otherwise, stick to something with a little more rigid backbone.